StressEraser allows you to rapidly calm your mind and relax your body. With regular use of the StressEraser, you will find yourself remaining calm and relaxed even in the midst of stressful life events.

StressEraser was designed as a portable biofeedback training device. The StressEraser is very compact and will easily fit in your pocket for use when and where you need it.

• Menu - You can set personal preferences and track your history
• Sound - Many people relax better with their eyes closed. The StressEraaser makes a tone when a triangle appears. The pitch of the tone indicates how many squares you scored on the previous wave. The volume is adjustable.
• Light - The light helps you use the StressEraser in the dark.
• 1 Year Warranty
• Timer - You can set a time limit for each StressEraser session

Basic Concept

Perhaps you have visited your doctor and he asked you to stick your finger in a little device. The little device, called a pulse oximeter, measured your pulse rate and the amount of oxygen in your blood. StressEraser uses a similar technology to identify every pulse the moment it occurs. Each time you get a new pulse, the StressEraser calculates a new pulse rate based upon the amount of time that has elapsed between the last two pulses.

Many people assume their pulse rate stays very constant. This is not the case. Pulse rates continually move up and down. The StressEraser displays the up-and-down movement of the pulse rate as a wave.

What causes your pulse rate to move up and down? Understanding the answer to this question is vital to understanding why the StressEraser works, as the answer holds the keys to becoming free from all three types of stress.

The Vagus Nerve

The up-and-down movement of your pulse rate is caused by the activity of one nerve in your body: the vagus nerve. You have many nerves that extend from your brainstem out to various parts of your body. These nerves are called cranial nerves. The longest cranial nerve in the body is the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve extends out from the brainstem to many organs and glands in the body, including the heart.

The vagus nerve is the primary pacifying nerve of the body. Each time the vagus nerve activates, it pacifies the organs and glands that it touches. This nerve pacifies the heart by decreasing heart rate. So each time the vagus nerve activates, the heart rate decreases. Vagus nerve activity comes and goes in waves. When it comes, the heart rate drops. When it goes, the heart rate returns to its baseline. This wave of vagus nerve activity causes the pulse rate to go down and up in waves.

What’s so important about the vagus nerve? When it comes to getting rid of stress—everything.

The vagus nerve instantly responds to both physical stress and emotional stress. Therefore, if you accurately measure the response of the vagus nerve, you can use that measurement to guide you to become free of physical and emotional stress.

Although we cannot monitor mental stress using the vagus nerve, its activity contains an important key for getting rid of mental stress. Vagus nerve activity suppresses the sympathetic nerves, nerves that increase mental activity. The brain is hardwired so that an increase in vagus nerve activity causes a reciprocal decrease in sympathetic nerve activity. The more active that the vagus nerve is, the less active the sympathetic nerves will become.

How does this help you with mental stress? By monitoring the time that the vagus nerve activity is strongest, we know when sympathetic activity is at its lowest. In other words, we know when the sympathetic nerves no longer have power to increase mental activity. This is an ideal time to shift your mind off of troubling thoughts and onto any other thought you choose, because at that moment, you don’t have sympathetic nerves agitating your mind.he StressEraser displays two sets of symbols to show vagus nerve activity. The square symbols below the wave tell you how your vagus nerve is responding to physical and emotional stress. The triangle symbols above the waves show you when the vagus nerve is ready for another burst of activity—the moment just before vagus nerve activity will be at its highest. The StressEraser relaxation method uses the symbols to guide you in calming your mind, relaxing your body, and quieting your emotions, in that order.

Monitoring the Vagus Nerve

In the 1970s, medical researchers developed different ways to use the heart rate measurements to monitor the activity of the vagus nerve. Some ways were very easy, others required complex mathematics. Ironically, in the 1990s it was discovered that the simplest measurement was also the most accurate one. Remember that the heart rate drops when the vagus nerve becomes active. Consider the following two pictures below of two decreasing heart rates.

Which one do you think shows stronger vagus nerve activity? The answer is the first one. Why? Because the heart rate only takes two beats to reach the bottom. In other words, the heart rate drops more between each heart beat. The heart rate is decreasing faster in the first picture compared to the second.

Interestingly, clinical studies have shown that when the distance between heart rates has doubled, the amount of vagus nerve activity has doubled as well. Likewise, when the distance between heart rates is cut in half, the vagus nerve activity is cut in half as well. This makes perfect sense. When the vagus nerve comes on twice as strong, it’s going to lower the heart rate twice as fast. And this simple fact gives you an accurate way measuring the amount of vagus nerve activity at any moment. To find the amount of vagus nerve activity over any period of time, we simply need to compute the average distance between the pulse rates. It’s simple and accurate.

Physical Biofeedback

As we already discussed, the vagus nerve responds to physical stress. It’s also important to note that physical stress responds to the vagus nerve. In other words, if you increase the activity of the vagus nerve, you will suppress the physical stress response. This is the fundamental premise of most stress reduction techniques. While this sounds nice in theory, there are some complications. One of the complicating factors is that everyone has a different range of vagus nerve activity. In other words, when we compute the amount of vagus nerve activity, it means nothing without knowing the person’s unique range.

For example, a vagus nerve activity measurement of 10 may be 20% of one person’s range, 50% of another person’s range, and 80% of another person’s range. In this example, the first person would not experience any relief from physical stress, the second person would experience moderate relief, and the third person would experience dramatic relief. Fortunately, there is a solution to this dilemma. The longer a wave is, the more a person’s individual vagus nerve activity is, provided the wave is smooth (we’ll discuss that below).

The StressEraser inventors developed a patent-pending method of finding the starting and ending point of each wave as it appears. It took more than a year just to solve this piece of the StressEraser puzzle. However, now that the waves can be identified, determining the relative vagus nerve activity percent for each person has become easy: simply measure the length of each wave. When your waves are short, the StressEraser concludes that your vagus nerve is not active enough to relax your body. When your waves are medium in length, the StressEraser concludes that you have moderate vagus nerve activity and therefore you are alleviating physical stress. When the waves are long, the StressEraser concludes that you are rapidly alleviating physical stress. Short waves are marked by , medium waves are marked by , and long waves are marked by .

The length of the wave is only meaningful if the wave is smooth. If the smoothness of the wave is disrupted, the wave is marked by , regardless of how long the wave is. When a wave is marked with a it is a broken wave.

Emotional Biofeedback

Identifying broken waves is another unique, patent pending technique of the StressEraser. Why is identifying broken waves so important? To understand the answer, first look at the distance between the pulse rate points during a break in the wave:

Notice how close together the pulse rate points are. There is almost no distance between them. In fact, the distance between them is almost zero. In other words, the activity of the vagus nerve has almost completely stopped for a moment. This is why broken waves are to be avoided whenever possible. So what causes broken waves? Broken waves are caused by anything that interferes with vagus nerve activity. During your use of the StressEraser there are three primary things that will cause broken waves:

• Strained breathing. If you are exhaling too long or your breathing is not smooth, you will cause a broken wave. Smooth breathing simply means that you are gently, gradually inhaling and gently, gradually exhaling. By choosing a good exhale count and breathing smoothly you can remedy this cause of broken waves.
  
  
• Mental distraction. If you experience a high level of distraction (the phone rings, someone calls your name, etc.) your wave will break. By gently returning your focus to your counting during the exhale you can remedy this cause of broken waves.
  
  
• Emotional distress. Any painful or emotionally charged thought will interfere with vagus nerve activity and break your wave. This is discussed below.

The limbic area of the brain regulates your emotional responses. The limbic system is one of the primary inputs into the vagus nerve. High limbic activity causes a disruption in vagus nerve activity. Therefore, each time you have an emotional response, vagus nerve activity gets interrupted, the wave breaks, and your StressEraser detects it.

Mental Biofeedback

As discussed above, when vagus nerve activity is at its strongest, sympathetic nerve activity is at its lowest. Sympathetic nerve activity increases brain activity and agitates the mind. And an ideal time to shift your mind away from troubling thoughts is when sympathetic activity is at its lowest. Consider the heart rate plot below:

When the heart rate first begins to descend from the peak of a wave, there is often a burst of vagus nerve activity. The force of the vagus nerve is very strong at this moment. The StressEraser uses a complex mathematical algorithm to anticipate this burst of vagus nerve activity in advance. Each time the StressEraser determines that a burst of vagus nerve activity is about to occur, it will display a triangle symbol above the wave:

StressEraser Relaxation Method

We have discussed how the StressEraser measures both physical stress and emotional activity. These two measurements are used to create the square symbols at the bottom of the StressEraser display. We have also discussed how the StressEraser determines the ideal time for you to shift your attention away from troublesome thoughts. The StressEraser marks these moments with a triangle symbol above the wave.

The StressEraser relaxation training method uses these symbols to guide you step-by-step in calming your mind, relaxing your body, and quieting your emotions. You will learn to do each of these - in that order - by following the “Getting Started Guide” that comes in your StressEraser package.

• StressEraser Unit
• Carrying Case
• Quick Start Guide
• Stress Eraser Manual
• 4 AAA Batteries
• 12 Month Limited Warranty

StressEraser Manual